I shared what I knew on the topic and government employees could lose their jobs for misappropriating pronouns and now in America Government workers are threatened with losing their jobs if they are not vaccinated. These are aggressive authoritarian moves that do concern me.
I think this is important. It’s one of those words that everyone knows, but everyone uses differently. Like “neoliberal” or “socialism”, for example. Probably a good idea to define these sorts of terms as we go.
I am personally interested in the “post-woke” project where we can transclude what we like in a more integral/developmental embrace (such as the “zones of systemic racism” that I’ve been sketching out), while negating the pieces we don’t like and/or are developmentally inappropriate.
Happy to point to various discussions we’ve had on the site about this, if that would be helpful!
Wait … government workers !!!
I’m sorry - I agree with you that much about COVID isn’t known. But Government Workers are, well, working for the government. They can’t expect the government not to make a policy for them, lol. I work in private industry. If my boss tells me tomorrow I have to get pee tested for drugs, I can either comply or find somewhere else to work. This has been the case for 50 years. Government workers have ALWAYS been subject to invasive policies like random drug testing or - before wokism - questionnaires about their sexual practices that served no actual purpose.
When you choose an employer, they have certain rights and policies and your rights and are limited if you want their money.
You have to accept the culture of the organization paying you money. I work for a conservative and many of our clients come to us from conservative talk radio. We have at least three conservative talk radio hosts as clients. But my boss also has a health condition and is at risk so any time I get even a sniffle he tells me to stay home - without pay, lol. If I don’t like it I can find somewhere else to work, lol. That’s capitalism and the free market.
@excecutive
I’m curious if you are consistent and believe that the government (such as the military) has no right to enquire if an employee or potential employee has sex with people of the same gender, or if they engage in “deviant” sexual practices?
I am not disagreeing with anything you write here @raybennett. I am underlining the authoritarian push on the American Citizen and yes it is quite concerning to me. Freedom with the “The Right to Choose” what we do with our own bodies seems reasonable to me. Freedom to buy and sell goods and services without permission papers seems reasonable to me too. I’m no conservative but I’m sure becoming one.
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I honestly think COVID was a big red pill many people are being forced to swallow but they are believing that these things are new when in fact they have always existed. I had to have a vaccine passport to attend school back in 1974. No vaccine passport = no public school, no joining the military, no government job.
When I joined the workplace it was before we were allowed to dress how we like, so I was required to shave every day, keep a specific haircut, wear suit and tie in a specific limited range of colors, use specific forms of address to superiors and customers, and not discuss religion or politics in the workplace. That was back in the 1980’s.
You were born into authoritarianism and COVID might be the pill that made you aware of it. Things have been building for decades and now COVID has drawn the curtain.
But understand - it isn’t “wokism”, Obama or Biden that made the country authoritarian. That’s just what partisan political operatives want you to believe.
I cannot comment on the legal status of wokism. But I can comment on the cultural (semiotic). Andrew Breitbart doctrine: Politics (i.e., law) is downstream from culture. The law is intended to serve culture. I don’t understand @raybennett’s faith in the law. It’s just an instrument of culture, and a blunt instrument at that. And as @excecutive notes, wokism can and does impact on people losing their jobs. Cancel culture is a product of wokism. So is censorship by BigTech. Wokism is taking the law into their own hands, creating unspoken laws for a bullying culture that go beyond the simple clarity and impartiality of the rule of law. Wokism has impacted on rapes in women’s prisons here and here and in my previous link above. The law is trivial compared to the freedoms that are being eroded in our increasingly authoritarian cultures. Law by groupthink is far more pernicious than law by government decree.
This sentence makes no sense to me.
Simples. The law is an instrument of reality, not reality itself. Culture is reality.
The issue came before the court on an application for an order preventing transgender persons guilty of sexual assaults at from being kept in women’s prisons. The application was refused on the basis that the statistics re sexual assaults by transgender prisoners on prisoners were too low and of insufficient detail to be conclusive and the issue was more to do with risk management by the prison. I find it difficult to accept your argument re wokism given this information.
I am not an “anti-vaxxer” and have been vaccinated. I was a vigorous supporter of the ideas pushed by Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals in my younger years. There is something happening that concerns me. I was hoping you would restore my confidence @raybennett … it seems the radicals have won and the sane voices in the halls of power seem to have left the room.
For the record “wokism”, Obama and Biden, or Bush and Chaney and “the new world order” have never been my calling. I don’t defend or support either-side. I am in the spiritual space of understanding and chose to try and live a life above the fray. Despite your best efforts to goad me in 
I am asking honest questions that a lot of my friends on the left are asking now too. So again I’ll ask is this authoritarian push at all a concern for you?
Ditto me too. I’m not an anti-vaxxer but have had both Pfizer shots. The neo-cons were a disgrace. I occupy the middle ground (as I would, given my assumption of culture as primary and politics as its instrument). As someone who grew up in Australia, I’ve had exposure to a form of authoritarianism that is poorly understood, and their current covid hysteria reflects it. America was never perfect, but it has lost something very precious, and it seems that too many Americans just don’t care. They are more afraid of being called mean names than standing against the mob-think that now threatens them.
I actually disagree with this. “Cancel culture” has been a primarily conservative ethno-centric tactic, from burning witches to Beatles albums, from the Dixie Chicks to Colin Kapernick. The telling and troubling thing, I think, is that “progressives” are beginning to employ similar tactics, due in no small part to the fact that we are all walking around with video cameras, which has totally reshaped our perceptions of each other, and the cultures that arise between us.
That said, I have no problem with the idea of holding people to account who conduct themselves reprehensibly in a public space. But the idea of filtering a person’s entire social media history just to find something objectionable is deeply disturbing, and is in fact the antithesis of the idea of “progress” that are supposed to be the root of the progressive brand.
I also have pretty major disagreement with Breitbart’s frame here. It makes for “good” politics, but absolutely terrible governance. From where I am standing, the vast majority of LL culture wars are reactions to LR governance — usually a result of reactionaries reacting to reactionaries, ad nauseam. In truth, there is very little an elected leader can do to “solve” the culture wars or even move the needle in one direction or another, beyond simply representing one tribal identity or another.
If you want to change the shape of our LL culture, the most effective way is to change the shape of our LR containers.
I personally wish we could have less emphasis on politics, and far more emphasis on governance.
My own .02 
Our tribal leader in the UK has been described thusly: he looks to see which way the crowd is heading, runs to the front and shouts “follow me”.
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Are you ok with a former President of the USA being banned from Twitter and Facebook, while recognized terrorist organizations are actively publishing on these platforms?
Bad conflation. Please separate the issues.
Me, too
I’m sorry - I don’t have confidence myself.
I’m literally heading to the hills. I sold my condo recently and I’m building a house in a remote location to hole up for “the next one” - because I don’t see the root problems that caused “this one” being addressed at all. It just doesn’t seem sensible to be on a small island with a million people completely dependent on a fragile global supply chain. Far better to be on a Big Island that is 10 times bigger with 1/10th the population.
If there is a silver lining, I would say that a lot of things are now coming “out in the open”. Like in a family when people bug each other year after year but don’t say anything then suddenly it all erupts in a single argument over something trivial. But then after the eruption and everything’s out in the open, then it’s possible to move forward.
My opinion is that there are some very deep problems in our modern world that people just don’t want to recognize, so they target something like “wokism” or on the opposite side, Trump. But climate change and topsoil erosion are just two examples of problems that don’t disappear because we might direct our anger at a thousand straw men.
Authoritarianism is a problem to my mind but not nearly as bad of a problem as how absolutely people have given up their very basic ability to reason and think for themselves and instead be directed how to think by either the Liberal media or the Right wing media. Then the entertainment media determines what they believe they enjoy and how they achieve self actualization.
If I can give you a “boost” - I will say that you are badly needed in these times and if you create a spiritual space of understanding and live above the fray, then your work is badly needed also. Me “goading” you is / was an opportunity for self reflection and you met the challenge and overcame it by looking within. Tip of the hat to you for maintaining congruency.
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I think the obvious answer is that of course Twitter and Facebook do actively try to keep recognized terrorist organizations off their platforms.
Can you link me (by dm if you don’t want it public) a terrorist organization that is active on twitter or facebook?
I’ll do you one further and spend a few hours trying to get them banned if I am provided with the link.
But I suspect this is yet another straw man from you and you don’t actually have any link to give to verify.
Yes, thanks for reminding me. I agree that it has carried a distinctly conservative flavor for a long time. But having visited Hungary/Czechoslovakia in the latter communist years as a teenager with my parents, I was struck by how the communists also wielded authoritarianism with the same exuberance, although perhaps less of the “righteousness” (heck, how could one be righteous in a culture of rampant corruption?). So perhaps it is more appropriate to regard these tactics as inevitable manifestations of “power corrupts”, regardless of who’s in power?
Holding people to account for reprehensible behavior… who defines the boundaries? This opens a can of worms. As @FermentedAgave suggests, as per the banning of President Trump on Twitter and Facebook. Recently Surfshark cancelled journalist Andy Ngo’s account (Andy Ngo reports on Antifa’s anti-democratic, often violent behavior) based on unsupported, unverifiable allegations. That is reprehensible (and it’s backfiring haha… people are cancelling their own accounts with Surfshark, it’s going to cost them). The crispness, clarity and impartiality of the rule of law, I think, is preferable to unsupported, unverifiable allegations by often anonymous complainants. A culture supported by an undercurrent of snitching is creepy.
I agree that governance (how one manages the business of politics) is important. But governance relates to leadership which relates to culture. People (culture) choose their leaders, their leaders are manifestations of what the culture stands for. Governance failure is often a symptom of culture unravelling. As per Trump and now with Biden. There is no escaping culture, Trump and Biden are products of it… AND the creators of it, as we all are.
It’s important to not conflate the “rule of law” with “Private Company TOS”.
A company has the right to refuse service for a wide range of policies. For example, many restaurants have dress codes. In the East there are signs “no shoes, no shirt no service”
You do not have freedom of speech in someone else’s house - they can kick you out whenever they want. A private corporation has the right to keep people off it’s premises pretty much arbitrarily, and a webspace is an extension of their private property.
Private property is a keystone of capitalism. Dictating who a company can and cannot allow to speak on it’s private property is anti-capitalist.